Toon Moene's Home Page

The Daily Grind

I work as a researcher at KNMI, the
Dutch Weather
Service, on improving the HIRLAM and
HARMONIE weather forecasting systems. Both weather forecasting
programs are (for the most part) written in the
Fortran programming language.

Since the 12th of January 2009 I have been running
my own instance of HIRLAM
on my PC at home under GNU/Linux (CPU: Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz,
Memory: 4 GByte, using gfortran
and OpenMPI).
Originally, this run was meant to catch coding errors in the development of HIRLAM,
but it has also found meteorological errors (e.g., the treatment of water in its
various phases from the boundaries).
From the 7th of August 2012 onwards, this setup - with an increased resolution -
runs on a PC with a quad core (hyperthreaded) Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz
and 32 Gbyte of RAM. Since the 10th of September 2012, an instance of the HARMONIE model
was added (no graphs yet). This one caught meteorological errors, too, in the treatment
of snow. On the 25th of July, 2013, I upgraded the motherboard to one that contained a
Haswell processor; unfortunately, this combination didn't lead to stable operation. On the
14th of May 2015 I succeeded in reviving the HIRLAM run, by making it robust against spurious
reboots.

This disaster took place in the middle of the night during the 50's of the last century.
If you want to get an idea of the damage done by a wall of sea water rising 6 meters
above the ground your house is built on, watch this (native)
footage
of the March, 11th, 2011, tsunami in Japan, in broad daylight -
the result of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake.

I am also a member of the
GCC Steering Committee and the
Fortran Standardization Committee, which recently greeted two new members.
In the past, when Fortran was a necessary ingredient in selling 8-digit-dollar hardware,
its standardization was a fierce battlefield, as exemplified by
this account.
On second thoughts, it's still needed to sell 7-digit GBP/year hardware as shown by
this behemoth,
which employs three different Fortran compilers, one of which is GNU Fortran.

Note that all GNU Fortran maintainers are volunteers;
this means that Fortran still plays a major role in computing -
nobody has to be forced to work on it ...

Those working on GCC
came together once a year during the
GCC Summit in
Ottawa until 2008,
and gather from 2009 onwards in
Montreal,
but from 2010 (October) again in Ottawa.

[ That is, since 2003. Before that, there were occasional gatherings like during the Linux Expo's.
At the last one, in 1999, I presented the following - discussing g77,
of which these are the accompanying slides ].

In 2005, I presented this paper
in Ottawa, to show the progress of GNU Fortran.

In 2006, I hoped to present the sequel
to this paper, as by that time GNU Fortran was fully able to correctly
compile HIRLAM, the weather forecasting
model used by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands,
Spain and Sweden.

By the way, some might think the present strife on the African continent makes it
unsuitable for economic prosperity. Let me recall the "situation" of the European
continent just 70 years ago - well within my parents' memories:
The Second World War.

... More Non-Profit

Another volunteer activity I am involved in is the "Wereld Winkel Maartensdijk"
(whose activities in the Anglo-Saxon world are better known as
Fair Trade).